Our Company Is Doing So Well That You're All Fired

The person you were replying to is explaining why firing people "raises the stock price". And yes, it really is that complicated.

Firing people whose salaries have a dramatically positive ROIC for the company does not raise the stock price, it lowers the stock price.

The mistake, in retrospect, is the executives': they should not have over-hired in 2020.

I know it's a bizarre silver lining, but to the extent there is one, workers got capital (in the form of SBC and cash) that they otherwise "shouldn't" have. If those companies had been run more effectively, most would have never been hired in the first place.

It's kind of a crap silver lining, because we psychologically feel loss [of a job] 10x more than gain, but the realistic "market-optimal" alternative was not "I have this cushy, high paying job forever", it was actually "I have never had a cushy, high paying job".

>Are you fired for any mistake you make in your job? Generally not

Yeah I think when a layoff is enacted, you made more than a mistake, you fundamentally missed something. Its outside the bounds of needing to be perfect or what have you, something went sideways in a big way, and unless you can actually simply trace it down to market forces beyond your control and you are telling me those people can't be productively moved into other parts of the business, then sure, we have some criteria for layoffs, but then we can be adults and get walked through the failures and how there wasn't anything that could be done.

How many situations do you think this actually applies? I have been apart of 2 layoffs (not affected in either, thankfully) in the past 3 years.

In the first situation, I and others repeatedly warned that our biggest 3rd party integration, which made the backbone of our business, was going to ban us for abusing their APIs and other business practices that we were doing, and we needed to address that. This was repeated all the way up to the highest levels, I was in the meetings with the CEO, talked about precedent etc.

They didn't change anything. The ban eventually happened, and they never recovered, laid off over successive rounds, ultimately ~50% of staff is gone now, because of this very obvious strategic error.

In another situation, they tried to blame it on interest rate hikes, but before interest rate hikes, we were sounding the alarm that we were on-boarding way too many iffy customers (its a fintech place for SMBs to manage AP) with out of bounds credit profiles, and that these new sign ups would dry up way too easily, we needed to re-focus on a better core ICP before we try to further expand the business, try and target customer segments with stronger business profiles etc, and this is prior to the majority of the interest rate hikes. I and several others made this case, and yet again, not headed, layoffs hit 6 months later, because all those customers either went belly up or had to downsize themselves, because they were too credit dependent.

So what commonality do you think this happens? Because I have a feeling its alot more than is acknowledged.

Twitter/X hasn't seen notable user growth since ~2015/16 and has been absolutely flat since then, coming up on a decade now. It was 325 million active users in 2015 and it's still about 300 million active users today (spring 2024). A decade of no growth. I don't know if twitter is functioning exactly the same as it was before, but if you have to pay the bills, cutting 80% of the workforce and holding the line seems to have worked in this case.

Having 5000 engineers on tap for... potential user growth? Makes sense if you're planning on user growth, but Twitter is kind of the poster child of "we don't need engineers for anticipated growth" given a near-decade of totally flat userbase number.

Haven't you seen how discussion lately has improved in quality?

For whatever mixture of reasons, the world is finally waking up.

We should start lobbing some good thoughts and respect on folks around us, and start to bring them around. The government is us, and needs us.

The time is here.

What's interesting is that capitalist systems often make socialist systems poor through sanctions, military intervention, & other underhanded tactics. It's a geopolitical game of control & socialism stands of defiance over the banking establishment. Times seem to be changing though as the commodity producing nations are gaining leverage & winning wars against colonial nations. The problem for the colonialists is if the peasants walk away, peasant work is no longer as inexpensive & readily available.

I'm all for free markets, but the end-game of capitalism is power cartels backed by military intervention...not free markets. So socialism seems like an interesting alternative to collaborate. That being said, rhetorical systems are used to convince people to adopt an underlying real political order.